Blood and chocolate
by blink bunny
Summary: Duo is a werwolf, and he lives with his pack, but life is not as it was...the pack is falling to shreds and he can do little but nothing. He feels fear, anger, love, hate and angst. This is a yaoi story, and Shinigami Neko has been bugging me to hurry up


Warning: YAOI! That means boy/boy love for all those peeps who don't know the meaning! And also, OOC-ness! And AU  
  
Disclaimer: does it look like I own the g-boys?! If I did I would sue cartoon network for not airing the REAL episodes...none of this nonsense...  
  
  
And also, this is all from the book, "Blood and Chocolate", so don't sue me please, and later it will be 1+2, but not for a WHILE  
  
Blood and chocolate  
May/June next year, Midsummer moon  
  
  
"Dad, you've been fighting again." Duo glared at his father. Quatre Winner lolled in an easy chair, one long slim leg thrown over the arm. He refused to stop grinning. A gash in his cheek still bled lightly.  
"You look awful," Duo said. "Yeah, but you should see the other bitch," Quatre answered. He scratched his scalp luxuriously with both hands, tousling his fine blonde hair.  
Duo sighed and came over to dab at his father's cheek with a tissue grabbed from the box on the coffee table. He would ruin his beautiful face. "Can't you and Relena leave each other alone?" It had been like this ever since they'd moved here from West Virginia, over a year ago now. He hardly knew his father anymore. "Can't you?" he repeated.  
"Wufei called for you," Quatre said, ignoring the question. Duo rolled his eyes. That was all he needed. Couldn't he take a hint?  
Quatre sat up and looked directly at his son. "I thought that's where you were, with Wufei and the others."   
"No, I wasn't." he bristled at the though. The five young males who were his only age-mates were likely to get the rest of the pack killed if they kept on going the way they were.  
"So where were you?"  
Duo turned to leave the room. Since when was his father so worried about where he was? "Down by the river, at the rocks," he said over his shoulder.  
"What were you doing there?"  
"Nothing."  
As he left, Duo heard his father growl softly in frustration.  
Why did Quatre always have to bring up the five? Couldn't he get it through his head that Duo didn't want to be with them?  
The familiar knot in his gut formed hard and tight. The fire last year had been the five's fault- and Solo's. He slammed the door of his room. The inside face of the door was channeled with claw marks. He grew his nails and ripped another row.  
Solo had to go and kill that girl.  
Solo had been acting wilder and wilder last spring, and talking crazy stuff. He had heard him and the five boast about midnight visits to town where they stalked humans in the shadows and scared them silly. What they did sounded funny. Duo made them take him, too. But rumors started going around school. People were getting nervous. When Duo said maybe they should cool it, Solo and the five only laughed at him.  
Then Solo began to go off by himself, and something seemed wrong to him. He didn't talk as much. It drove him crazy.  
I was half in love with Solo, Duo thought as he stripped off his pants. Wufei thought I was his bitch but I would have dropped him in a second for Solo. He sniffed in disgust. Caring for Solo made me stupid.   
He'd seen their behavior spinning out of control, and he hadn't done a thing. He should have told his father what they'd been up to, even if that meant she'd be in trouble himself. But you didn't squeal on your friends, did you?  
Then the night of the Valentine's dance Solo went to town alone and killed a girl in the back of the school.  
Duo still felt the heat of anger when he thought of what he'd done. He couldn't help thinking he killed her for some petty reason, like the girl turned him down. And he could have had me, he thought bitterly.  
He must have been changing back when a classmate saw him crouched over the body. Before Solo knew he was there, the boy took off and named him to the police.  
The five decided to help. They killed another girl while Solo was in jail. They didn't let Duo know their plans; they must have thought he'd object. And I would have, he thought, but he wasn't sure.  
"How could a boy be covered in fur? How could a human inflict such wounds?" the family lawyer pleaded for Solo. They knew killing while Solo was locked up proved there was a wild animal on the loose. Solo had merely discovered the body, then had panicked and run. The case was dismissed.  
But someone from town believed the witness's tale of a wolf that turned into a boy, and late one night the inn and outbuildings burst into flame in six different spots, and black acrid smoke hid the moon.  
In the 1600's, his ancestors had fled from werewolf hysteria in France to the sparsely settled New World, and by the end of the century had settled in wild Louisiana. In nineteenth-century New Orleans the Verdun triplets broke the ban on human flesh and the pack moved in hast to West Virginia, where they were joined by the remnants of a German pack from Pennsylvania. Last year the forbidden appetite had won again, and the pack took flight from the hills that had been it's home foe one hundred years and had arrived refugees in the Maryland suburbs-five families plus assorted others crammed into uncle Rudy's run-down Victorian house in Riverview. With luck, no one would follow them here; they could mark new trails.  
The house on Sion Road had emptied out gradually as the others found jobs and places to stay, until it held on Duo, Quatre, and uncle Rudy. Duo had thought that by this time they would have made plans for the future, but now the whole pack seemed to be crazy, his father included. With more than half of them dead, no one knew his or her place anymore. Survival depended on their blending in while they organized and decided where they would move and settle for good, but at any moment the pack was likely to explode in a ball of flying fur. They needed a leader badly, but no one could agree whom.  
Blend in, he thought. If only I could.  
Last summer he had hid in his room and slept mostly, and in the early hours of the morning, the time when wolf-kind come home to shed their pelts, Duo would here his father crying inconsolably by her open bedroom window for someone who would never come home again.  
By the time his junior year started, however, Duo had begun eating almost regularly, and Quatre had found himself a job as a waitress at Tooley's, a local dive. Gradually it wasn't so hard to make it through the day. Duo was no longer exhausted when he walked in the door at three-thirty, and the schoolwork began to make sense.  
He started to look longingly at the groups of kids laughing together around the flagpole after school.  
At first he thought, Why would I make friends with people who would kill me if they knew what I was? What if I give myself away? But the yearning continued. It was then he realized that he didn't know how to make friends.  
He had always had the pack around him, the pack that now hid in their separate dens. There were always pack kids. He had never had to reach out for company, company was always there. The five were still around, of course, but now he couldn't bear to be with them, and they could never be just her friends now, anyway. They all saw him as a mate-be nice to on, and the others would soak and snap. Fight, fight, fight, that's what paying attention to them meant.  
I want other friends, he thought. But no one seemed to want him.  
He stood in front of his closet mirror in his T-shirt and twisted this way and that. What's wrong with me? He wondered.  
There was nothing the matter that he could see. He was tall and leggy, with a smooth flat chest, that rippled when he moved. His skin was gently golden; it was always golden, sun or not, and his chestnut hair was smooth and silky, which he kept tied back in a braid that reached his calves.   
So why was it that groups of guys stopped talking when he approached them at school and answered his openings with terse words that killed the conversations he tried to start? Was he too good-looking? Was that possible? Was that the threat they saw? He was a beautiful loup-garou, he knew- the five howled for him-but what did human eyes perceive?  
Some boys nudged each other when he passed; he's seen them out of the corner of his eye. They noticed him. And he could understand thy one or two might blush and stammer if he talked to them. There were always shy boys who would die id any girl noticed them. But where were the bold ones?  
Male, or female, they resisted him. Could they see the forest in his eyes, the shadow of his pelt? Were his teeth too sharp? It's hard not to be a wolf, he thought.   
He missed the mountain slopes where humans were far apart and the pack was close, and he hardly ever had to pretend.  
I don't care, he thought, twirling around. I don't need humans. I still have the pack, and we'll be moving on again soon. But he did care. The pack was in shreds, and in the midst of these humans he was wolf-kind- loup-garou- and this made him and outsider and unwanted. But they would like me if they took the time to know me, he thought. They just don't know me.  
He flung himself onto his bed and stretched his legs in the air to admire their sleek curves, holding his hips to brace himself aloft. He stretched as hard as he could, toes pointed, fingers reaching, muscles in sweet tension, almost as sweet as the change to fur. "I am strong," he whispered. "I can run with the night and catch the dawn. I can kick a hole in the sky." And he struck out with a foot to prove his words. Then curled into a ball.  
He missed his father-his advice, his comfort. He bared his teeth at the familiar pain.  
From where he lay, he could see the unbroken wall he'd cleared of furniture and the mural he's started to console himself and to make this room his. Jagged, thick blacks made the forest a wild thing, texture on texture; the painted moon shone fiercely. There was red slashed into the dark-eyes, blood.  
Lous-garoux ran through the pooled moonlight on a night in his people ancient past. The stories said that by ritual, sacrifice, and sacrament, they opened their souls to the forest god, the great hunter who took the shape of the wolf. To reward them for their devotion, his mate, the moon, gave them the gift to be more than human. Then they could throw aside their pelts of hunted animals and grow their own, abandon their knives of flint and use their teeth. Their childrens children's children still carried the beast within, and all were subject to the moon.   
In the center of the mural was where he would become part of the night, where he would run with the pack of his ancestors. But now whenever he picked up the brush, he couldn't go on. He couldn't see himself there. He had a dream about the painting that kept coming back. He was surrounded by darkness and he couldn't see the muzzles around him. He was running, running, trying to reach the open night, but all around the huge forms crowded close and abraded his skin with their harsh thick fur as they thudded into and jostled him. And he couldn't grow his pelt. It was always their fur against his skin, and he'd wake up crying.  
As if to counteract the dream, he had become obsessed for a while and had created dozens of smaller painting and sketches of the pack he knew while growing up. They lined his closet and were stacked in the space between his dresser and the wall. They kept him from going crazy.  
The art teacher thought he was one of those punk artsy types that raved about the power of expressionism. Great moon, he'd shit a brick if he knew my subjects were real, Duo thought gleefully. He'd talked him into submitting a few prints to the school literary magazine. He's laughed at first, but why not? And now, to his surprise, there was one of his prints near the center of the   
Trumpet. Duo smiled. And no doubt those humans thought his work was to too-cool vision of the terminally hip and dangerous.  
Thought of this small acceptance pushed back the gloom, and he bounded up to fetch his backpack and have another look. He should leave the magazine open on the kitchen table for Quatre to see tomorrow before he went to work. Would he recognize his son's art? Would he be proud?  
He hadn't even bothered to see who he shared the space with. Is my work better than the others? He wondered now. A poem was on the page opposite of his. He looked at it suspiciously. A crappy poem would lessen what he'd done, make it cheap.  
The title startled him- "Wolf change." He read aloud.  
  
Corsair of the wood  
Discard your skin  
Your pallid, wormlike  
Vulnerability.  
Corsair of the wood  
Exchange your skin  
For pelt of dun  
A brindle luxury  
  
A pentagram is burning  
In your eyes  
And soft, pale twists  
Of wolf bane  
Squeeze your heart  
A grinding pain  
Is writhing in your thighs  
The crunch of bones  
Proclaims the change's start  
  
Pirate of the flesh  
Throw back your head  
And part your jowls  
To sing a lunar song  
The forest paths are dark  
The night is long.  
  
He shivered in delicious shock.  
He knows, he thought, he knows what's in the picture. Anger edged out the excitement and his eyes narrowed. Who was this Milliardio Peacecraft? Why should he know the forest paths?  
But he was intrigued. Maybe he would seek him out and have a look at this person who wrote of the crunch of bones, see if he approved of him.  
And what if he didn't? Set the five on him? He laughed softly, baring sharp white teeth.  



End file.
